The politics of national SDG indicator systems: A comparison of four European countries

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) constitute an ambitious comprehensive global framework including monitoring mechanisms and indicators to evaluate progress towards precise targets of sustainable development. Most European countries have adapted their national sustainability indicator systems to conform to the UN Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, introducing new indicators and monitoring frameworks and governance processes in which these are embedded. What do we know about the political processes and struggles of implementing this important global framework? How does the politics of indicators differ in national contexts? We propose a classification of national indicator systems along dimensions of indicator selection, appraisal landscape, participatory nature, and political communication. We empirically explore these dimensions for four European national sustainability indicator systems through a comparative analysis based on national policy documents, indicator databases, and web portals as well as inputs from workshops and expert interviews. Given the considerable variation with respect to the trajectory of national sustainability indicator systems, we posit that these differences correspond to different national interpretations of sustainability. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-022-01809-w.


Finland
Institutions that are officially mandated to review the sustainable development strategy and policy State/public institutions that proactively provide systematic reviews

Partly mandated appraisals & consultation processes
No mandate (non-governmental appraisal s and shadow reports) Germany ⇨ Federal Government publishes progress reports on sustainable development and the implementation of the sustainability strategy (2004,2008,2012,2014) ⇨ The Federal Ministries regularly issue departmental reports on the implementation of the National Sustainability Strategy.
⇨ Every tw o years, the Federal Statistical Office publishes an Indicator Report w ith an assessment of the achievement of the goals (2006,2008,2010,2012,2014,2016,2018,2021) as w ell as an evaluation of the indicator progress every four years (2008) ⇨ The German Council for Sustainable Development has been commissioned by the Federal Government to organise an international peer review of German sustainability policy (2009,2013,2017) ⇨ Parliamentary Advisory Committee issues an opinion on the Sustainable Development Strategy (2017,2019,2020), the indicator reports (2007,2010,2014), progress reports (2004,2008,2012) and peer review s (2010,2013,2018) ⇨ o Can we see a mainly data-driven approach or goal-driven approach? Who was involved in the development of the national indicator system? Was this an inclusive process / Citizen-based process / top-down process / bottom-up process / cooperation etc.?
Impor an : Wha o her aspec s make his indica or c l re special?
(2) Management of SDG indicators on the national level How is SDG/SD policy managed in broad terms (organizational chart)?
How are SDG indicators managed on the national level? By whom and how?
Who is responsible for reporting SDG indicators and national SD indicators?
Appraisal mechanism for sustainability strategy in Finland and the role of SDG indicators for environmental policy change What formal and informal appraisal mechanism exist to review the national sustainability strategy and the implementation of the SDGs? Do they exist? What is actually be done (year, link and actor)?
What role/function is assigned to the (environmental) indicators? What is the political debate about the indicator and how visible are they in the SDG discussion?
What role do indicators play in the implementation of the SDGs?
What is the role of SDG indicators for ( Each country team was asked to report through a broad search strategy to what extent indicators formed part of political conversations about sustainable development (e.g. in the press, parliamentary proceedings or NGO communication). A drawback of such a broad empirical strategy is the difficulty for systematic comparison. Results from workshops and interviews with indicator professionals and potential users were employed to generate more in-depth understanding of perceptions of key actors of the role of indicators in national SDG policy. An expert validation was undertaken by scholars that belong to similar networks (e.g. the Partnership for European Environmental Research) and come from similar backgrounds (European Environmental Evaluators Network) which raises problems of endogeneity. In the Finnish case, additional insights were obtained through personal participation on the indicator preparation processes. In Germany and France, interviews were conducted with actors involved in the governance of SDG strategies, as well as the development process of the SDG indicator system.
Questions were asked about the national SD indicator system, the actors involved in the development process and the challenges and potentials of the indicator system (while we could cover public actors systematically, it is possible that our coverage of ci vil society engagement with both SDG indicators and implementation processes is incomplete). The Danish case study is primari ly based on a qualitative interview with a public employee from one of the Danish ministries central for the Danish SDGs and a comprehensive assessment of the Danish ministries ork ith the SDGs implemented and published b the Danish state auditors Rigsrevisionen (2020). After writing up the first draft, we revisited some interview partners for validation of our findings.

⇨ Appendix 4: National indicator systems -mapping overview o Denmark
In Denmark, the government is responsible for how to incorporate the SDGs into policies, and the Danish parliament Folketinget has not issued any legislation or guidelines related to the SDGs (Rigsrevisionen 2020). This means that the parliament does not formally oversee implementation of SDGs per se, but in so far as SDGs are implemented through other policies, Folketinget oversees the government s According to the European Parliament (2019) and the Danish Government (2017b) multiple actors (civil society, business, municipalities, youth, academia, primary and secondary schools) have been involved in the process on Danish SDGs. There were consultations and stakeholder conferences ahead of the introduction of the action plan and a so called panel as established ith members from different parts of society giving advice to members of parliament (EU 2019). In a common 2017 message from the Danish stakeholders they declared that they were invited to share expectations and wishes for the Danish SDGs, but also expected to be involved to a higher degree in future processes (Danish Government 2017b, p.41). After a change of government in mid-2019, there is no Danish SDG action plan, but a new plan was expected to be presented before the mid-2021 UN summit (Ministry of Finance 2020) Historically, the Danish indicator system has been shaped through international collaboration on the SDGs in Nordic Council (EU 2019;Nordic Council 2003). The Ministry of Finance is responsible for coordinating the national implementation (see figure 01), while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is responsible for implementing the SDGs in the UN context (and other international fora). The responsibility for follow-up on the individual 37 national targets has been divided among different ministries a substantial part are with the Ministry of Food and Environment (Interview Danish Ministry of Environment and Food 2019; Rigsrevisionen 2020). Each line ministry has an international/EU department which links domestic and international monitoring. Since 2016, the SDGs have been integrated into the national annual bill as part of the budget for development cooperation (EU 2019). Danish subnational policies are separate from national policies (EU 2019) resulting in large variation in SDG attention in the municipalities. Responsibility for the more technical indicator follow-up on the SDG targets is located in Statistics Denmark (Rigsrevisionen 2020), where the work is divided among different offices and coordinated by a dedicated SD G unit with input from ministries. A parliamentary working group for the SDGs was placed under the auspices of the Finance Committee. The aim of this group is to ensure coordination between national and international aspects of the SDGs. Additionally, a non-partisan network, the 2030network, which is open to all members of Parliament was established in 2017. Its main purpose is to facilitate information sharing and dialogue through meetings with government ministers and participation in public debates in Denmark and abroad, and has also initiated a baseline project. The network counts some high-level members of the Parliament. Germany developed their first sustainability strategy quite late, in 2002. However, it aligned and completely overhauled its strategy with the SDGs. A new sustainability strategy, including sustainability indicators, was adopted by the German government in early 2017. It was developed in a joint coordination process in 2015/2016 with the participation of the Federal Statistical Office and the respective ministries and an accompanying (limited) consultation process with stakeholders. Since then, the national sustainability strategy exists and can be regarded as the German translation of the SDGs. It has become the essential framework for the implementation of the 17 SDGs on the national level (Blumers and Kaumanns 2017).
Both the responsibility for reporting the global SDG indicators and the national SD indicators lies both with the Federal Sta tistical Office, even though each line ministry is responsible for providing data and for implementing goals that were specifically assigned to them. The Federal Statistical Office coordinates the data on the global SDG indicators and publishes the data every year. 3 In addition, an indicator report with the evaluation of the national SD progress is published every two years. The Federal Statistical Office is in charge of examining the updated list of national indicators introduced in 2018 (Federal Government 2018). While the responsibility for reporting lies with the Federal Statistical Office, regarding the management of SDG indicators, a highly sectoral way of thinking can be observed. Based on our interviewees, opportunities to work together across ministries on partly interlinked SDGs are rarely used (Interview BMUB). This is especially so in the case of environmental challenges and their respective indicators. External stakeholders view this similarly, but add that the larger problem is the lack of executive political party decisions to endow the sustainability strategy with sufficient energy (Interview BMUB). Beside the lack of commitment, administrative structures as well as resources are often insufficient to implement the planned measures, for example, measures in the course of the WFD (Interview BMUB). It is however noteworthy that the 2021 strategy includes a new emphasis on the need for sustainability transformations, most due to input from experts at the sciencepolicy interface (e.g. SDSN, German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) and others). The 2021 strategy now closely corresponds to conceptualizations within UN Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR 2019). Equally important, it now incl udes designated "Transformationsbereiche" (transformation areas) that include wellbeing/capabilities; energy/climate; circular economy; construction/traffic; food/agriculture; zero pollution) as well as new language on key transformation indicators ("Schlüsseli ndikatoren") and increased focus on off-tracks indicators. It also includes new indicators (some Covid-related), as well as new indicators that the coalition government wants to highlight which align with their agreed upon political agenda. Our interviews suggest that it is mostly due to input from the scientific community in Germany that the language of transformation is now firmly embedded in the strategy in 2021.
Prior to Agenda the national sustainabilit strateg DNS Deutsche Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie as divided into four a reas (intergenerational justice, quality of life, social cohesion and international responsibility) and contained 38 sustainability indicators which were mostly associated with quantified goals. With the rewriting of the sustainability strategy, not only was the division into sustainability areas realigned to the SDGs, but new themes were also included (including poverty, water, sanitation, consumption and production patterns and oceans). Despite this overhaul, most of the indicators that had been used previously were also unaltered in the new strategy. It was rather that new indicators were added to the strategy (not all of them were developed and set up without conflict indeed, in political and value negotiations are occurring in the shadow of these indicators). Since 2018 the sustainability strategy contains 66 indicators (Federal Government 2021), of which about half are similar to the global SDG indicators (Blumers and Kaumanns 2017). The reduced numbe r was selected based on a data-driven approach (leading to mostly quantitative indicators) and in a top-down process which was criticized for its lack of transparency. We find that the selection of indicators for the sustainability strategy was largely left to statisticians, who agreed on them in consultation with the relevant ministries. As the 2021 dialogue version on the further development of the German Sustainability Strategy once again states, statisticians in Germany should take over the analysis of indicator development "independently and under their own professional responsibility" (Federal Government 2021). A new and expanded version of the strategy was announced in March 2021 that substantially responded to critique from scientific commentators and that fortified language on sustainabilit transformations that ere necessary to attain in German sustainability policy. (Federal Government 2021b).
o France In France, the national preexisting sustainability strategy, revised some months before the establishment of the Agenda 2030 and the SDG framework in 2015, was called the national strategy for an ecological transition to sustainable development 2015-2020 -La stratégie nationale de transition écologique vers un développement durable (SNTEDD) 4 . It was adopted by the Council of Ministers in February, 2015, six months before the adoption of the UN resolution on Agenda 2030 and the SDG framework by the United Nations (September 2015). Deliberations about a new national SDGs strategy started separately in 2017 (Aubert et al. 2017) as this new strategy included the objectives of SNTEDD (which was mainly ecologically-oriented, and provided a roadmap until only 2020) as well as other (socio-economic) sustainability objectives, the SNTEDD was replaced de facto. This new document was released in September 2019 and represents France´s new roadmap 5 for the 2030 Agenda. Table 2: The ten wealth indicators and their inclusion in French, UN and EU goals and indicators 4 https://www.ecologique-solidaire.gouv.fr/strat egie-nationale-transition-ecologique-vers -developpement-durable-2015-2020 5 https://www.agenda-2030.fr/actualites/feuille-de-rout e-de-la-france-pour-lagenda-2030-368 After the release of the global SDG indicators in 2017, values for 120 SDG indicators were first published corresponding to the global SDG indicators available in France. However, those first reported values were based on previous data availability and were not used for national assessment of sustainable development (Interview MTES). To have an effective set of national SDG indicators, the National Council for Statistical Information (CNIS), in collaboration with INSEE and SDES, proposed a mandate in June 2017 for a working group to establish a set of SDG indicators that would track progress on the main SDG targets that are of relevance in France. Made up of more than 100 participants, this working group gathered people from a wide range of backgrounds (civil society, stakeholders, ministerial and statistical services). Following this work, a dashboard of 98 SDG indicators was proposed in mid-2018 which would constitute the national framework for monitoring France's progress in achieving the 17 SDGs (CNIS 2018). The French dashboard thus contains a number of UN global indicators deemed to be the most suitable for the national context, as well as the 10 new wealth indicators (also considered as SDG indicators and thus, published by INSEE like all the other SDG indicators) and additional indicators specific to French particularities, among which are some SNTEDD monitoring indicators